tlambert | August 3, 2009After George Monbiot panned Plimer's book for his grotesque scientific errors, Plimer challenged Monbiot to a face-to-face debate. Of course, Plimer would do his usual Gish gallop with such a format, so Monbiot agreed with just one condition:
Last week I wrote to Professor Plimer accepting his challenge, on the condition that he accepts mine. I would take part in a face-to-face debate with him as long as he agreed to write precise and specific responses to his critics' points -- in the form of numbered questions that I would send him -- for publication on the Guardian's website. I also…
tlambert | July 31, 2009Mercurius has listed the things AGW denialists will accept as evidence:
1) Nothing that was recorded by instruments such as weather-stations, ocean buoys or satellite data. Since all instruments are subject to error, we cannot use them to measure climate.
2) Nothing that has been corrected to account for the error of recording instruments. Any corrected data is a fudge. You must use only the raw data, which is previously disqualified under rule #1. Got that? OK, moving along...
3) Nothing that was produced by a computer model. We all know that you can't trust computer models, and they have a…
tlambert | July 29, 2009When Peter Sinclair made Anthony Watts the subject of his "Climate Crock of the week" video, Watts response was to attempt to suppress the criticism by making a bogus copyright claim against the video. Naturally this hasn't worked, with Desmogblog reposting the video. Better see it in case Watts tries again. Also of interest is Roger Pielke Sr's harumphing about the video.
tlambert | July 28, 2009John McLean, the guy who kept guiding Andrew Bolt off cliffs, has this time taken Bob Carter and Chris de Freitas with him. As tamino explains, they say that recent warming trends can be attributed to natural variation, but their analysis removed the trend from the data. See also McLean's defence and Robert Grumbine's lucid post. James Annan exposes another error - they fit a step function to that data and conclude that there is step in the data merely because there is a step in the fitted step function. John Lott made the same mistake in his "more guns, less crime" argument, as I showed…
tlambert | July 23, 2009Carl Zimmer summarizes:
In earlier days, Will liked to claim the World Meteorological Organization as an authority when he wrote that there has been no global warming since 1998. Now that the World Meteorological Organization has set things straight, he's claiming a columnist at National Review as his authority. That's quite an upgrade.
Actually, it's worse than "a columnist". His authority is fact averse Creationist Mark Steyn.
tlambert | July 23, 2009People outside Australia are probably unfamiliar with Piers Akerman, who is an absurdly partisan columnist for Sydney's Daily Telegraph. Tobias Ziegler finds Akerman not only denying the existence of global warming but also the existence of any criticism of Plimer's book and even the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere.
tlambert | July 20, 2009This thread is for people who wish to engage Ray in discussion.
Ray, please do not post comments to any other thread.
Everyone else, please do not respond to Ray in any other thread.
tlambert | July 15, 2009Some people have wondered what happened to Ian Plimer. Before his current anti-science book, didn't he take it to the creationists in Telling Lies for God? Trouble is, Plimer's methods have not changed -- Telling Lies for God has the same cavalier approach to evidence as Heaven and Earth. Jeffrey Shallit reviewed it and concluded:
Unfortunately, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, what is good about Plimer's book is not original, and what is original is not good. ... We cannot successfully fight the pseudoscience of creationism by adopting gutter tactics. After all, the creationists have much of…
tlambert | July 9, 2009Ian Plimer is well aware that numerous serious errors of fact and interpretation have been exposed in his book but has yet to mount any kind of substantive response -- all he has done is call his critics names. As a result James Delingpole leaves himself wide open when he writes an excessively credulous review of Heaven and Earth:
My tribe doesn't believe in global warming! ... Plimer has a sciency-looking book saying it's all a big hoax! ... the Australian government will collapse ... Al Gore is fat!
OK, that was a paraphrase. Except for the bit about the Australian government collapsing.…
tlambert | July 7, 2009Chilingar has republished his paper that shows that if you assume CO2 is not a greenhouse gas then it doesn't warm the planetin Enviromental Geology. This paper is so bad that S Fred Singer has resigned as an editor from Environmental Geology. Yes, this S Fred Singer.
Hat tip: Eli Rabett.
tlambert | July 6, 2009With US combat troops withdrawing from Iraq's cities it is time to compare the 4639 coalition casualties with the predictions made by warbloggers before the war:
John Hawkins: "Probably 300 or less"
Charles Johnson:"Very few"
Henry Hanks: "Less than 200"
Laurence Simon: "A Few hundred"
Rachael Lucas: "Less than three thousand"
Scott Ott: "Dozens"
Glenn Reynolds: "Fewer than 100"
Tim Blair: "Below 50"
Ken Layne: "a few hundred"
Steven Den Beste: "50-150"
And there were roughly a million excess Iraqi deaths.
tlambert | July 2, 2009Chris Mooney refutes claims that a skeptical report was suppressed by the EPA. (See also Deep Climate's analysis of the origin of the report.
Another story about skeptics being suppressed has been concocted by Christopher Booker:
Dr Taylor had obtained funding to attend this week's meeting of the [Polar Bear Study Group], but this was voted down by its members because of his views on global warming. The chairman, Dr Andy Derocher, a former university pupil of Dr Taylor's, frankly explained in an email (which I was not sent by Dr Taylor) that his rejection had nothing to do with his undoubted…
tlambert | July 1, 2009You might have learnt in stats class how to use linear regression to estimate trends. Well I'm sorry but you going to have to forget it all and the boring statistics books are going to have to be rewritten because that stuff is obsolete due to revolutionary breakthrough by Roger Pielke Sr. If you use the boring-and-now-obsolete linear regression stuff on the University of Colorado at Boulder sea level data you discover that the trend is positive and highly statistically significant, even if you just consider the data since 2006.
But using his revolutionary new technique Roger Pielke Sr…
tlambert | June 26, 2009Senator Fielding has rejected the science and now claims:
Over the last 15 years, global temperatures haven't been going up and, therefore, there hasn't been in the last 15 years a period of global warming,
Clearly there was never any chance of convincing someone who can look at a graph like this one and not see any increase in temperature since the mid 90s:
Fielding has released a reply from his four denialists to the answers to his questions. Basically they just continue to insist that global warming stopped in 1998. Tamino takes them apart with lots of graphs:
It's appropriate to end…
tlambert | June 24, 2009Last week week Senator Fielding met with the Minister for Climate Change, Penny Wong to discuss the link between global warming and greenhouse gas. While Fielding claimed to have an 'open mind', this was rather undercut by his bringing four denialists to the meeting: Bob Carter, David Evans Stewart Franks and Bill Kininmonth. Naturally, The Australian gives them space to write about global warming isn't happening and how their questions were not answered. Wong has answers to their questions (written by Will Steffen) here, but I'll give my answers as well:
Carter and co write:
Is it the case…
tlambert | June 16, 2009
Hey, remember how Monckton got published in a UFO magazine? Well, now he's in a Larouche publication, Executive Intelligence Review (see cover to right), being interviewed about the IPCC plan to RULE THE WORLD.
However, they are not concerned
with whether there is a problem or not. They
merely wish to pretend that there is a problem, and try
to do so with a straight face, for long enough to persuade,
not the population, because we have no say in
this, but the governing class in the various memberstates
of the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change: That they should hand over…
tlambert | June 14, 2009Professor David Karoly of the University of Melbourne's School of Earth Sciences is an expert on climate change, so like every other scientist who has read Ian Plimer's error-filled book, he was appalled at how bad it was. His review:
Now let me address some of the major scientific flaws in Plimer's arguments. He claims 'it is not possible to ascribe a carbon dioxide increase to human activity' and 'volcanoes produce more CO2 than the world's cars and industries combined'. Both are wrong. Burning fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide enriched with carbon isotope C12and reduced C13 and…